Qualcomm details Snapdragon lineup, demos Windows RT tablet

Qualcomm says it is expanding beyond mobile with new variants of its Snapdragon S4 SoC. The company made the announcement at Computex and highlighted four different product lines — Prime, Pro, Plus, Play — that will go into everything from HDTVs and set-top boxes, to PCs and various Windows 8 devices.

The Snapdragon S4 Prime chip features a 1.5GHz quad-core CPU with Adreno 320 graphics and will power smart TVs and set-top boxes, promising to bring the "mobile experience" to TV. Chips in the S4 Pro family include the Qualcomm APQ8064 and MSM8960T and will power the next-generation of Windows RT tablets and laptops, while S4 Plus is designed for the high-end smartphone market and the S4 Play will focus on the entry level smartphone market, featuring dual-core CPUs clocked to 1.2GHz and Adreno 203 graphics.

Qualcomm noted that Snapdragon is very much ready for Windows RT and showed off a reference tablet running Microsoft’s OS on a dual-core, 1.5-GHz Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 during the event. That SoC will be the first to be used in Windows RT devices when they hit the market. Later this year, Qualcomm will also offer a quad-core version of its Snapdragon S4 for Windows RT devices, but to add the extra CPU cores it will have to remove the integrated 3G and 4G LTE modems that are part of the MSM8960.

The company didn’t say when the S4 would appear in a shipping Windows RT products, although it did reveal that devices are actually in production at this very moment. Windows tablets and laptops with the Snapdragon S4 should go on sale roughly simultaneously.